The Joke May Soon Be on Downtown San Diego

In January, Super Bowl visitors were overheard complaining that San Diego was a fuddy-duddy town that rolled up the streets at sundown. OK, so we have busy theaters. But what is there to do after 10 p.m.?

Four local producers want to change all that. They’re betting that audiences will want to keep going after the shows close--in San Diego, no less--and that the place they’ll want to go is downtown . . . for comedy, monologues and music.

Aren’t they worried about competing each other out of business?

Apparently not. They’re even considering a collective newsletter to woo San Diegans into the late-night habit.

Local comic Grant Goulet plans to open Club Comedy in Horton Plaza, adjacent to the United Artists theater complex. In the meantime, Goulet will work at the San Diego Repertory Theatre’s Underground at the Lyceum on its first preview weekend--starting tonight--in the lobby of the Rep. Goulet said local comedy has exploded since his debut in 1979 at the Comedy Store, where he shared the marquee with a comic making her debut--Whoopi Goldberg.

“There are 300 people for every stage in America,” said Goulet, who has worked in Los Angeles and Washington, where he helped start the Comedy Cafe. “I see people who make me fall out of my chair, and they have never come close to being on television.”

One of the first things Judy Milstein did when she was hired by the Rep to develop the Underground was solicit feedback from Goulet, Dick Bunnell of the Media Arts Center on Kettner Boulevard and Carlos X. Pena and David Chandler of the downtown-based Progressive Stage Company.

Progressive’s recent “After Hours” program brought in near-capacity crowds, topping even the turnout for plays the company was doing. Progressive plans to reopen “After Hours” in January. Bunnell said he’s scheduling the opening of a late night cabaret/coffee house in January, to coincide with Underground’s official opening.

All agree the collective problem is getting folks to believe that life does exist in San Diego after 10. Three of the four claim to feel unencumbered, saying they can always fall back on theater if Late Night flops.

But Goulet has taken a considerable gamble.

He has the lease, the designs, the structure--scheduling comedy all day and into the night at Horton Plaza. The architect says it will take six weeks to convert the space into a Disneyesque firehouse set, complete with a firehouse pole for comics to slide down. Glasses will hang from fire-engine ladders. Hats and coats will hang from firehouse hooks. But Goulet needs investors to get construction under way.

“The downtown area is going through the roof with the renovation of the Gaslamp district,” he said. “In five years, you won’t be able to get into this space. I’ve spent close to $30,000 and a year and a half of my life just to get this going. It’s exciting. I believe it’s going to come. But it’s scary. Because it’s not guaranteed.”

“Great Expectations” were fulfilled when the North Coast Repertory Theatre collaborated with United States International University on the Charles Dickens classic in October. The show broke all box-office records for the theater, thanks to the interest of high schools that use the book in literature classes.

Now USIU will bring the show back as solo producer Thursday through Dec. 24 at The Theatre in Old Town.

The show proved not only that the North Coast could fill a new 200-seat space--twice the size of the old--but that the “date” between a professional and college theater had a chemistry that clicked. North Coast benefited from USIU’s generous set budget and teen-age talent pool, and USIU profited from the North Coast’s stature and adult talent pool.

It wouldn’t surprise anyone if a second date followed down the road; after all, Andrew Barnicle, new associate artistic director at North Coast, moonlights as chair of the USIU theater department.

One person extremely pleased with the show’s success was Minnesota playwright Barbara Field, who originally adapted the show in 1983 for the Seattle Children’s Theatre.

Field is no stranger to San Diego. In 1962, when she lived here with a husband whom she has since divorced, she entered an early stab at a one-act play at the Old Globe Theatre “as a joke”--it was selected for a production.

She has since “repressed” the name of the play.

“It was awful ,” she said with a laugh, in a telephone interview from her home in Minnesota.

She was back last summer to check on the San Diego leg of her touring adaptation, “Frankenstein.” While here, she called on friend and fellow-Minnesotan Lee Blessing, who was then finishing up “Two Rooms” for its world premiere at the La Jolla Playhouse.

While other Minnesota friends have had their plays successfully produced in San Diego theaters (August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” and John Olive’s “The Voice of the Prairie,” both at the Old Globe), she had no idea one of hers would be next.

“I’m surprised,” she said. “And delighted.”

The Lamb’s Players Theatre’s “A Festival of Christmas” may not be San Diego’s answer to New York’s infamously inaccessible “Waiting for Godot,” but the box office is playing hard to get with the tickets. That makes Kerry Cederberg, the playwright who has written these original plays for the past 11 years, happy indeed.

When she answers the box office phone to turn you down, she does so with an apologetic giggle.

“By the fifth year we’d done it, it started to sell out before opening. We don’t even advertise and people call in March for tickets. It’s our biggest moneymaker. We just have to keep scheduling more and more performances.”